Many areas in the United States and abroad are facing the problem of safe handling and disposal of medical waste. The situation is aggravated as the number of generating sites multiply. Any contact with bodily fluids generates medical waste, so hospitals, nursing home facilities, home health care services, dental offices, dialysis centers, funeral homes, and many more locations become generators. Problems of disposal are increased by the cost of safe handling which encourages illegal dumping and fouling of beaches with medical waste. There is also an exposure problem in transporting infectious medical waste to incineration sites. The materials requiring safe disposal range from soft bandages and rubber gloves, to paper, textiles, glass, plastics and steel needles.
This bio-hazardous waste has a range of hardness and includes bandages, plastic devices, adhesive tapes, hypodermic syringes or needles, intravenous (IV) needles, surgical gloves, and bottles. This contaminated medical waste is bulky and many truckloads are required when carting this material from large generators or pickup points. While in transport the material remains bio-hazardous. There is a serious liability exposure if a bag accidently falls off the truck while in transit to secondary processing such as incineration. Government agencies are dissatisfied with the incineration system and it is expensive.
Several attempts have been made to solve the medical waste disposal problem by destroying and disinfecting medical waste on site but many of these machines use special blades, cutters, knives or rotors that are expensive to manufacture and maintain and cannot handle both soft gloves and hard glass and steel needles in the same batch. Current machines that use heat for sterilizing cannot handle a wide range of waste in the same batch because some soft items would vaporize, possibly giving off noxious or toxic gasses, before other items would be sterilized.
Some related art shows using vapors to maintain sterilization, not to sterilize. Applying disinfectant to waste prior to completely reducing the pieces to their final size does not insure that all of the surface area of the waste is exposed to disinfectant.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a machine that can handle a variety of bio-hazardous waste in the same processing batch, that is less costly to manufacture and maintain, thus available to more waste generators, and of a scalable design both on volume of waste processed and size of waste items.